Inception: Interesting idea, stupid premise

*Spoiler alert. If you have not seen Inception, and don't want to know anything about it before you do see it, don't read this.

Yeah, I'm late to this party. I finally watched "Inception" for the first time last night.  If you haven't seen it, or like me know nothing about it, then here is a quick plot summary:

People can extract information from people's dreams through "dream sharing." In a twist, Leonardo DiCaprio's character must instead PLANT information (the seed of an idea, really).

I loved the multi-level depth of the movie - that is, we see the movie through at least three, er four, levels of dreaming. I've heard/read several folks talk about being confused and getting lost while watching. Maybe I've seen too many of these kinds of movies, but it was pretty clear to me which level was being portrayed on the screen at any given time.  This was mainly because each environment was so different than the others.  Had they made everything just a little different between levels, it would have been harder for me to follow.

Since Leo's character is just trying to get "back home," it never made sense to me that this one guy in the whole world (the 'client') was the only person who could make Leo's trouble disappear. And, it never made sense that all of this was just industrial espionage. Oh well. I suppose that was part of the idea, though. Since the movie ends just as I would expect, we will learn more should there be a sequel.  Let me cut to the chase: the ending was stupid and totally predictable.  Of course the spinning top will keep on spinning. For me, the top should have fallen over just before the cut to credits. But, then, I'm not out trying to make a billion bucks on movie sequels.

I enjoyed watching the van scenes cut to the hotel cut to the central winter outpost cut to the 'private world' and back again. The movie had to spend a lot of energy explaining how 'time' works between the dream levels. I do wish they would would have had some turbulence on the plane or something. We never cut back to the plane until the 'end.' Of course, I suppose they wanted the viewer to forget these folks were all asleep on the airplane in the first place.  To that end, I fully expected to see Leo's wife show up in the airport.  Glad they didn't go that route, but it didn't matter. As I said, the end was predictable enough.

Inception is a nice one-time flick. It is like Matrix in a way. It is like Brainstorm in a way. The film makes us examine our own reality and question just what *IS* reality.  Human are kind of obsessed with that.